"This is going to be very cool," said Duncan Buell, the professor of computer science who guided a group of 10 undergraduate students involved in the software application's development during the spring semester.

Duncan Buell

Buell is aiming for a prototype smart phone tour of the Horseshoe in which users can click on Gamecock icons embedded in a campus map to reveal historic and contemporary interior pictures of several buildings.

Among highlights will be the South Caroliniana Library and the Gressette Room in Harper College. University Archives provided historical photos and University Technology Services provided current pictures.

"Once we get the first couple of stops on the tour done adding more of them won't be conceptually difficult," said Buell, adding that tours of each building will take users through an animation that walks them to a starting point where they can then access other available images.

"With a program like this, once you get the basic structure of the app done, adding locations means a little more work and having to worry about bandwidth and things like that, but it's not that much more of an effort."

Buell embarked on the project with the intent of producing an app for an Android smart phone that would be relevant to a National Endowment for the Humanities-funded computer gaming institute at the University this summer. The institute is a project of the University's Digital Humanities Initiative.